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DeepMind, a London-based "neuroscience-inspired AI company" bought by Google in January 2014, has launched DeepMind Health. Its first project is a collaboration with the NHS. The company says: "We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care."

Working with leading kidney experts at the Royal Free Hospital in London, DeepMind Health has produced a mobile phone app called "Streams." It is designed to present "timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury" (AKI). DeepMind says that "AKI is a contributing factor in up to 20% of emergency hospital admissions as well as 40,000 deaths in the UK every year. Yet NHS England estimate that around 25% of cases are preventable."

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To bolster the capabilities of Streams, DeepMind Health has just acquired the company behind Hark, a clinical task management app. "We are delighted to announce that the Hark team is planning to join forces with DeepMind Health so we can accelerate and scale their efforts to revolutionise task management in hospitals," said DeepMind. "We plan to integrate their work into Streams over the coming months."

This suggests that Streams will become a general clinical data and task management app. At the time of publishing, DeepMind had not responded to requests for clarification about its plans, but we'll update this story if that changes. Currently the company's site merely offers vague generalities: "While projects like Hark and AKI detection are in their early stages, the problems they solve are fundamental to the NHS. The hope is that these tools can help shift more resources away from reaction and towards better prevention. Ultimately the aim is to give nurses and doctors more time to focus on what’s most important."

Also unclear is how DeepMind will use its in-house AI expertise. On its website, the company writes: "artificial intelligence is not part of the early-stage pilots we’re announcing today. It’s too early to determine where AI could be applied here, but it’s certainly something we are excited about for the future." Presumably the idea is to use AI to help medical staff spot problems sooner, and to deal with them more effectively.

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Applying AI in this field will necessarily require highly personal data to be accessed and processed. DeepMind is well aware that this is a sensitive issue: "Patients need to be certain that all their health data is handled with the utmost care and respect, and that their privacy and security are protected at all times. We have, and will always, hold ourselves to the highest possible standards of patient data protection." In addition, it is setting up a group of unpaid, independent reviewers who will scrutinise DeepMind Health's data sharing, privacy and security practices every quarter, and issue an annual report.

DeepMind Health says that its data-sharing agreements with the NHS hospitals "ensure that patients' data will always be stored in the UK and won’t ever be linked or associated with Google accounts, products or services." It also says "data will only ever be used for the purposes of improving healthcare," but that would presumably include Google carrying out additional in-house analyses that might be relevant to that goal.

In many ways, it is issues like how to square privacy and patient consent with innovative data mining techniques that are the hard problems in digital health, rather than anything technical. Unfortunately, even DeepMind's AI is unlikely to help much here—unless, of course, it is so advanced that it develops an ethical sense to help handle these tricky questions.